The discontent of the volunteers was just; but it rendered them of little further use as an army. At their own request, they were marched from Dixon to Ottawa, Illinois, by way of Pawpaw Grove, and there disbanded on the 28th of May. The best material for soldiers in the whole world had been rendered worthless in four weeks by incompetent commanders and an inefficient commissariat, at a heavy expense to the public; but a great deal had been accomplished, nevertheless, in the needful instruction given to one young captain.

The Governor of the State called for two thousand men to take the places of the disbanded regiments, and a large number of the discharged men re-enlisted at once. Officers became privates rather than go home in such an inglorious fashion. General Whiteside himself entered the ranks as a common soldier, and so, among the rest, did Captain Lincoln, as a member of the "Independent Spy Company."

By the middle of June the new forces were ready, and they again marched up the banks of Rock River. In the mean time Blackhawk and his warriors overran the country they had come to conquer and intended to keep.

The troops were fairly well-handled now, and the campaign which followed was a vigorous one, resulting in the utter defeat and almost the destruction of the savage invaders. But the work of the Independent Spy Company included little fighting. There was a great deal of hard work done by them indeed. There was much perilous scouting, with fast traveling as messengers, on horseback and on foot, and their exposure to danger was of a sort that they did not need to be ashamed of. The company was finally disbanded, and the men were discharged at White Water, Wisconsin, just as the war was drawing to a close. Lincoln prepared to set out for home, in company with a friend and comrade named George W. Harrison. Their horses were stolen from them the night before their intended start, and they were compelled to reach Peoria, Illinois, on foot, with some help of borrowed rides

on the horses of other soldiers who were going in the same direction.

Here they bought a canoe and paddled down the Illinois River until, just below Pekin, they overtook a timber-raft. It was easy to make friends with the raftsmen, in whose company they floated lazily down stream as far as the town of Havana.

The rest of the homeward way was a hot and tedious tramp across country. It was ended in due time, and the man who went out as a captain and came home as a private had returned to discover, through a slow and painful progress, what and how much his army career had done for him.

CHAPTER XIII.

POLITICS.

Lincoln a Candidate-Stumping the District-Defeat-The Credit System -Lincoln a Merchant.'

THE politics of the United States were in a noteworthy condition in the year 1832. There were parties, and party-spirit ran high; but party organization, such as now controls the country, did not then exist. In the West generally, and in Illinois in particular, the complicated machinery which was already in process of formation among the older States was wholly unknown. Instead of it there was a species of political chaos, although the State was nominally Democratic in its majorities, and for many years continued to be so. The old Federal party was dead and buried, the Whig party was yet unformed, and men wandered hither and thither among the great questions of the day, vainly striving to discover what these were and whither the country was drifting.

so.

In the absence of nominating conventions large or small, it was the custom for candidates for office to nominate themselves, if they could persuade a few friends to urge them to do One consequence of this was that, for almost any elective honor, high or low, there were frequently as many men in the field as candidates as could combine their ambition with the energy and means to make the required canvass. For the latter some kind of personal popularity was of much more importance than any other qualification.

The volunteers who went from Sangamon County to the Blackhawk War returned to their homes in squads or singly, the greater number bringing little with them besides their very

moderate allowances of military glory. Abe Lincoln succeeded in adding to his own share of this, and it was as large as anybody's, an intense but somewhat local popularity. He greatly increased his fame as an orator, also, by a speech he made in the New Salem debating club shortly after his return. It was the first regular "speech" he had delivered in that community, and his neighbors were ignorant of his powers until that hour. When he arose to begin, the audience expected no more than a well-told story and a good joke or so, and prepared itself accordingly for an appreciative laugh.

Abe's hands were in his pockets at the first, and his words came to him slowly; but he was not there for the purpose of making fun. To the astonishment of his hearers, he seriously took hold of the subject before them, warmed with it as he went on, argued, reasoned, declaimed, with a force and an awkward eloquence which took them all by storm.

Mr. James Rutledge, the owner of the mill, was president of the club, and he for some reason felt a deep interest in the coming election for members of the State Legislature. He was very strongly impressed by that speech, and a few days afterwards he urged the young orator to offer himself as a candidate.

Lincoln at first refused, on the ground that he was little known in the greater part of the county, which was a large one, and that he should surely be defeated.

"Perhaps not," said Mr. Rutledge. "They'll know you better after you've stumped the county. Anyhow, it'll do you good to try."

Other friends added their solicitations, and Lincoln's modesty gave way under the pressure.

It seemed a tremendous undertaking for a mere boy who the year before had drifted into New Salem as a farm-hand and flatboatman. That it was not altogether absurd offers a window through which a remarkably good view can be obtained of the then social and political condition of things in Illinois.

The general canvass that fall was hot and spirited, for it was the year of General Jackson's election to the Presidency. Lincoln had from boyhood admired "Old Hickory." He was still nominally a "Jackson man," although the principles he advocated in his speeches were almost identical with those upon which the Whig party was afterwards built up.

The politics of the State of Illinois, however, were agitated by other questions besides those upon which the nation as a whole was divided. Candidates for the Legislature, even more than for other public positions, were required to meet their constituents upon numerous topics of strictly local importance. The State was fast going crazy upon the subject of "internal improvement." Roads of all kinds, and navigable rivers of designated sizes and patterns, were wanted in all directions. There was a vague idea abroad, daily obtaining a strong hold upon the minds of men, that all these could be provided by a majority vote of the State Legislature in the enacting of a "law."

Lincoln believed that a great deal could be done for the Sangamon River, and he was ready to prove it upon stump after stump. He was also earnestly in favor of laws providing for popular education. An address which he issued to his constituents two years later dealt freely with this and other topics, and was a very creditable document for a youth of twenty-five with barely a year of aggregated schooling to look back upon. He now issued no address, but he had had some training for the task set before him, and he took hold of it vigorously.

A canvass of Sangamon County was not in those days a matter for a man of weak body or sensitive nerves to think of lightly. It meant a going from place to place wherever a crowd could be gathered, and a readiness to face boldly not only any assembly of proposed hearers, but also such other assemblages as might propose to interfere with both speaking and hearing. There were fair copies of Clary's Grove and its gang of roughs in almost every precinct, and all this element